Tag Archives: Atlanta Braves

The continuing ballad of Billy the Kid

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Billy Wagner

Billy Wagner stood 5’10” . . . but to the hitters facing him, he must have looked and felt 10’5″.

When Billy Wagner called it a career after a short tour with the Braves, he spoke like a man who wasn’t worried about whether he’d make or endure on a Hall of Fame ballot. “I’m not going to change anyone’s mind about whether I’m a Hall of Famer,” the longtime relief pitcher said. “People are either going to like me or hate me, and I can’t change their minds. Besides, life is about a lot more than this game.”

That was fifteen years ago. Tomorrow should reveal that enough voting members of the Baseball Writers Association of America have changed their minds. Wagner’s first Hall ballot showed him with 10.5 percent of the vote. At this writing, his final appearance on the BBWAA ballot should usher him into Cooperstown with at least 85 percent of the vote, well above the minimum needed.

Thus would Billy the Kid stand on the induction stage with outfielder Ichiro Suzuki (bank on it: he’ll become the first unanimous election among position players on their first Hall ballot), CC Sabathia (another first ballot lock, though a hair over seven points less than Ichiro), and Carlos Beltrán. (80.3 percent.*)

Almost a week ago, Wagner wasn’t sounding as sanguine as he did upon his retirement from the mound. “You’re sitting here and you can’t control [the outcome],” he told The Athletic‘s Tyler Kepner by phone. “It’s tough. I hate it. It’s just not been a very fun experience, especially when it comes down to your tenth and final ballot. It’s not going to be pleasant. It’s a grind, but in a couple of days, this will be over—one way or the other, good or bad.”

That wouldn’t necessarily be true. Wagner could and likely would make an appearance on a future ballot of the Hall’s Contemporary Baseball Era (Players) Committee, perhaps as soon as next December. But it looks as though nobody has to worry about that anymore. Wagner, especially.

Last week you’d have had to go the extra hundred miles to convince him. Last year, he waited and waited only to fall short by five votes. When Kepner asked Wagner if that compared to being spurned for a prom date with his buddies watching live and millions more watching on television, he couldn’t resist laughing. Then, he calmed down again and answered soberly.

“My gosh. You’ve got thirty kids looking at you,” he began.

I’m emotional, I don’t want to be emotional, so I’m fighting it back like, “Well, you know, it’s great.” You’re saying all the things you need to say, but it was awful. So the ballot comes out, they take all their stuff and leave—and you’re still going through practice. There’s no, “Hey guys, we’re going to take a five-minute break here.” You couldn’t do anything. That was rough. I was so embarrassed.

If the current indicators hold, and I’m not sure how you can tumble from 85 percent of the vote to falling beneath the 73 percent line without some very suspect eleventh-hour activity, the man who stood 5’10” as a human being but about 10’5″ to the batters he faced pitching for the Astros, the Phillies, the Mets, the Red Sox, and the Braves, is about to become anything but embarrassed.

Which is more than you can say for those batters over the sixteen-year career that ended in 2010. You might wish to become the proverbial fly on the wall if those batters could round up for a seminar called, “How Not to Hit Billy Wagner—Because You Can’t.” The beginning of Wagner’s Hall of Fame case, and possibly the end, too, is this: Opposing hitters could only hit .187 against him.

.187.

Not even The Mariano himself kept hitters that sharply out of luck. Wagner’s .187 batting average against him will become the lowest BAA of any Hall of Fame relief pitcher. Lower than Rivera and Trevor Hoffman (.211 each), lower than Hoyt Wilhelm (.213), lower than Dennis Eckersley (.225), lower than Goose Gossage (.228), lower than Bruce Sutter (.230), lower than Rollie Fingers (.232), lower than Lee Smith (.235).

Among that group, too, are a mere four who pitched in the most hitter friendly of times: Smith (in the final third of his career), Hoffman, Rivera, and Billy the Kid. That, I’ve written before and don’t mind repeating, should make you wonder what the record would have been if Wagner could have avoided assorted injuries including a late-career Tommy John surgery.

And before you take up carping yet again over his comparatively small number of innings pitched, try to keep these in mind: 1) It wasn’t his idea to finish with 903 innings pitched. 2)  His lifetime walks/hits per inning pitchd (WHIP) rate, as Kepner pointed out, is lower than any pitcher with 900+ innings in the century between the final game of Hall of Famer Addie Joss and Hall of Famer-to-be Wagner. Including The Mariano and Trevor Time.

If it’s numbers you still wish, how about these: The best strikeouts per nine rate (11.92) in baseball history. The best ERA (2.31) by any lefthander in the live ball era (1920 forward). The lowest opposition OPS (.558) in that same century between Joss’s and Wagner’s final games.

All of which are rather surrrealistic for a fellow whose hardscrabble childhood (and “hardscrabble” is phrasing things politely about a kid for whom peanut butter on a cracker was dinner often enough when he was growing up) including driving himself to throw lefthanded because two right elbow fractures made throwing his natural righthanded impossible.

That’s about as close to a self-made Hall of Famer as you can get.

“You’re not supposed to get too high or too low,” Wagner told Kepner about The Wait, “but you just sit with a big pit in your stomach right now, wondering where this thing’s going to go. You’re constantly fighting the buildup to that moment.” Finally, it looks as though Billy the Kid’s going to win his final fight.

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* Seemingly, Beltrán is about to be told about his Astrogate co-masterminding, “All is forgiven.” As if the writers didn’t hear, didn’t see, or chose to ignore, how Astrogate co-exposer Evan Drellich (in Winning Fixes Everything) zinged Beltrán for his post-suspension apology, the one in which he said he wished he’d asked more questions about what the 2017 Astro Intelligence Agency was doing.

Beltrán was as powerful a clubhouse presence as there was on the 2017 Astros, begging the question, what was stopping him from asking those questions? (Emphasis added.)

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This essay was first published at Sports Central.

The last of the big boys buried

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Johan Rojas

Young center fielder Johan Rojas making the catch of his life so far, robbing Ronald Acuña, Jr. of a possible Game Four-changing double and saving the Phillies’ NLDS triumph in the bargain Thursday night.

If you consider 100+ game regular season winners the truly big boys, they’ve all been knocked out of the postseason before it even got to the League Championship Series. The 90-game winning Phillies secured that dubious distinction when they sent the Braves home for the winter Thursday night.

And they didn’t need Bryce Harper to do the heavy lifting this time. Nick Castellanos was more than happy to do that when he hit two more solo home runs, this time off the Braves’ best starting pitcher, this time making himself the first man ever to hit two bombs each in two postseason games.

Spencer Strider all but owned the Phillies in regular season play. In postseason play the Phillies puncture him just enough, including in their National League division series Game Four. And, unlike a lot of young men whose ownership thus becomes subject to hostile postseason takeover, Strider didn’t flinch when asked the wherefore.

“I’m not a person that makes excuses,” Strider said after the Phillies punched their NLCS ticker with an emphatic enough 3-1 win. “I’m sure there’s a lot of Braves fans out there that are not happy, and they have every right to be that way. We’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves. Me personally, I wasn’t good enough.”

Neither did he flinch when asked whether the postseason system awarding byes to the top two seeds in each league harmed the Braves for the extra week off.

“I think that the people trying to use the playoff format to make an excuse for the results they don’t like are not confronting the real issue,” Strider continued. “You’re in control of your focus, your competitiveness, your energy. And if having five days off (means) you can’t make that adjustment, you’ve got nobody to blame but yourself.”

“We got beat,” Braves manager Brian Snitker said, “by a really good club that has a penchant for this time of year.”

For me, the real issue is letting teams into the postseason at all who give their fans the thrills, chills, and spills of fighting to the last breath to finish . . . in second place. Forcing the teams who owned the regular season to run the gamut through lesser-performing teams in order to even think about a shot at the World Series.

And yet, it couldn’t hurt to watch the games, anyhow.

Especially between the Braves and the Phillies, finishers one and two in the National League East. Especially since the Braves were the only departing division champions who didn’t get swept out of what’s now their only postseason set of the year.

The Phillies didn’t have easy work to do. Not against the team who hit a record 307 regular-season home runs. But nobody figured anyone, never mind the Phillies, to out-homer these Braves in this division series 11-3, with Castellanos and Harper accounting for 63 percent of those bombs, and Harper himself hitting as many homers as the entire Braves team for the set.

And, with Ronald Acuña, Jr., Mr. 40/70, held to three hits without reaching the seats while walking twice but stealing nothing.

The nearest Acuña got to serious damage was in the top of the Game Four seventh. With Cardiac Craig Kimbrel relieving Jose Alvarado, entering a first-and-second jam, Kimbrel went from 1-2 to 2-2 before handing Acuña something to drive to the back of center field. Citizens Bank Park’s crash carts were on red alert.

Then young Phillies center fielder Johan Rojas, who wasn’t hitting much but who was making his bones with the leather (he was worth nine defensive runs on the regular season), ran the drive down and, after one hesitation step at the track, hauled it in on the track two steps shy of the wall . . . and just shy of becoming at least a two and possibly three-run double.

Strider dodged a Harperian bullet in the first inning Thursday night. He had Trea Turner on second with a one-out double down the left field line and off the wall. He tried to pitch around Harper, knowing that Harper needs only one swing to wage nuclear destruction, but after falling behind 3-0, Braves manager Brian Snitker said don’t even think about it, put him on.

For that moment Snitker resembled Casey Stengel the Yankee dominator, as Strider struck Alec Bohm out and got Bryson Stott to fly out to center field for the side. Strider didn’t look overwhelming with two walks and two hits on his jacket in two innings. He needed help from center fielder Michael Harris II again, Harris making a highlight-reel sliding catch of Rojas’s one-out liner to center in the second, then doubling Castellanos off second for the side.

The Phillies’ plate plan included just making Strider throw as many pitches as possible whatever the results. But they wouldn’t say no if an early count pitch looked delicious enough to dine. With one out in the bottom of the fourth, and the Braves up 1-0 thanks to Austin Riley’s solo homer in the top of the frame, Strider served Castellanos just such a slider, and Castellanos served it into the left field seats.

Phillies shortstop Trea Turner saw a similar feast heading his way on the first pitch with one out in the bottom of the fifth, breaking the tie with his own launch into the left field seats. Until then, Turner had faced Strider seventeen times in his career and gone hitless for his effort. What a difference two months plus makes.

One moment, in August, Turner’s struggles were so profound that someone asked, and Phillies fans agreed, to bathe him in cheers just for encouragement his first time up. Now, he put the Phillies in the lead and would finish the set with a 1.441 OPS for it. He also finished a triple short of the cycle in Game Three and became the first Phillie—ever—to have a 4-for-4 game in a postseason set.

An inning after Turner unloaded, Castellanos finished Strider’s evening’s work with another solo homer. This time, Castellanos was kind enough not to do it on the first pitch, hitting a 1-2 fastball not too far from where his first bomb landed.

The Braves had one more shot at forcing a fifth game in the ninth. Marcell Ozuna wrung a leadoff walk out of Phillies reliever Gregory Soto and Sean Murphy singled him to third. Exit Soto, enter Matt Strahm. He got Kevin Pillar to pop out behind second base where Turner hauled it in; he got pinch hitter Eddie Rosario to fly out to left not deep enough to score Ozuna; and, he landed a swinging strikeout on pinch hitter Vaughan Grissom.

That sealed the fate of the Braves who’ve been ousted from two straight postseasons after winning the 2021 World Series. This time, the Phillies pitching staff and defense found a way to keep their regular-season threshing machine from threshing in this set. (Their NLDS slash: .186/.255/.264.) The Braves’ pitching staff and defense couldn’t stop the Phillies from looking . . . almost like the regular-season Braves. (The Phillies: NLDS slash: .275/.373/.565.)

“Obviously, we’re going to have to make an adjustment in the way we handle the postseason and the way that we focus and prepare for it,” Strider said, “but we’re going to get to work the moment we get out of here.”

Like the Dodgers, the Braves had compromised starting pitching. They missed veteran Charlie Morton, dealing with an index finger injury. Also, having Max Fried pitch only once in three weeks prior to Game Two because of finger blistering hurt.

But Braves catcher Travis d’Arnaud, who pinch hit for Harris in the Game Four seventh and drew the bases-loading walk from Kimbrel, handed the Phillies the major credit. “All of them stepped up,” he said. “All of their big offense and their pitching. Their bullpen all stepped up. Their starters all stepped up. Ranger had a tremendous series, Zack (Wheeler) had a tremendous game, (Aaron) Nola, their whole bullpen. Their pitching was unbelievable.”

Wheeler, Nola, and Game Four starter Ranger Suárez have started all six Phillies postseason games thus far. Their collective ERA for the span: 1.54. The Phillies bullpen over the same six games: 1.29 ERA. D’Arnaud may have made the understatement of the postseason through today.

“In baseball, it’s not always the best team that wins, it’s the team that plays the best that day,” said Braves reliever A.J. Minter, who surrendered one earned run in two and a third series innings. “And they played better than us, that’s what it came down to. We’ve just got to come back this offseason and be ready to go at spring training . . . When we won the World Series in ’21, we weren’t necessarily the best team.”

The best team doesn’t always win. You can ask the 1921 Yankees, the 1924 Giants, the 1952 Dodgers, the 1954 Indians, the 1969 Orioles, the 1981 Reds, the 1987 Tigers and Cardinals, the 1990 Athletics, and the 2001 Mariners, among others. Now, you can ask this year’s Braves, Brewers, Dodgers, Orioles, and Rays, too. Those were baseball’s top five teams this season.

But now the number six Astros go to the American League Championship Series against the number eight Rangers, and the Astros will be the only division winner involved in an LCS. The number seven Phillies go to the National League Championship Series against the number twelve Diamondbacks. There’s a reasonable if not ironclad chance that baseball’s seventh or twelfth best team could face its eighth best team in the World Series.

You tell me something isn’t terribly wrong with that picture no matter how much fun the games were to watch, anyway. No matter how much you loved Harper answering the post-Game Two trolling Braves. No matter how much you loved Castellanos’s Games Three and Four demolition or Harper’s continuation as his own kind of Mr. October. No matter how much you loved watching the Phillies’ pitching keep the Braves from truly serious mischief. No matter how much fun we’ll have watching the two LCSes, anyhow.

Just don’t ask commissioner Rob Manfred.

“I’m sort of the view you need to give something a chance to work out,” Manfred said. “I know some of the higher-seeded teams didn’t win. I think if you think about where some of those teams were, there are other explanations than a five-day layoff. But I think we’ll reevaluate in the offseason like we always do and think about if we have the format right . . . It’s Year Two (of the three-wild-card format). I think we need to give it a little time . . . We all want the competition to be the best it can possibly be.”

As the great (and Spink Award-winning Hall of Fame) New York Times baseball writer Red Smith once said of then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn dismissing Curt Flood’s reserve challenge out of mealymouthed hand, Commissioner Pepperwinkle really seems to be saying, “Run along, sonny, you bother me.”

NLDS Game Three: Poke the Philly bear, pay the penalty

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Bryce Harper, Orlando Arcia

“Stare downs aren’t an official stat (yet!), but we’re all in awe of Harper over here.”—The Elias Sports Bureau.

Memo to: Atlanta Braves, particularly shortstop Orlando Arcia. Subject: Poking the Philadelphia bear. Dear Braves; dear Orlando: just. don’t. do it. For real or allegedly.

Because the Philadelphia bear, whose human name is Bryce Harper, is liable to do to you what Yogi Bear only dreamed of doing with the contents of picnic baskets. He’s also liable to inspire similar destruction by his mates while he’s at it. And that Citizens Bank Park crowd in Philadelphia won’t let you live it down.

Whether Arcia really cracked “ha ha, attaboy, Harper” Monday—after Harper was doubled up by a hair to end National League division series Game Two, having rounded second on a long fly that looked as much like an extra base hit as an out before Michael Harris II’s stupefying catch—might have been speculative alone.

But it appeared in print, as you might expect when there might be three to five times more reporters in a postseason clubhouse than a regular season one. As Phillies manager Rob Thomson said Wednesday, after Harper and company demolished the Braves, 10-2, “If that adds to his motivation, then thank you.”

Affirming that the Monday mockery did indeed come from his postgame mouth, Arcia told reporters after Game Three, “He wasn’t supposed to hear.” Whether he meant Harper or the reporter(s) who put it into print wasn’t entirely clear, and hardly mattered. It wasn’t wise to poke a bear who had the entire Show’s second highest win probability added factor this year.

Harper swore he heard of Arcia’s trash talking from teammates. “They looked at me,” he said, “and they were like, ‘What are you going to do?’” It wouldn’t take too long before they got their answer.

With the game tied at one following Nick Castellanos’s leadoff bomb in the bottom of the third, Brandon Marsh singled promptly and Trea Turner pushed him to third beating out an infield single against Braves starter Bryce Elder, who can be a good pitcher but who’d spent the season’s second half struggling heavily.

Up stepped Harper. He took two low and away pitches after fouling off the first. Then, he ripped a hanging slider into the second deck behind right field. Rounding second, Harper gave Arcia a stare that would have meant a death sentence had it come from a Mafia caporegime.

“Stare downs aren’t an official stat (yet!),” Xtweeted the Elias Sports Bureau, “but we’re all in awe of Harper over here.”

The demolition that followed—including a second Harper homer—could be considered the Braves’ death sentence, depending upon how well they regroup and recoup behind Game One starter Spencer Strider on Thursday. And, whether Strider himself can handle the Phillies a little better than he had (eight strikeouts but two runs including a Harper smash) in Game One.

After Monday’s Braves one-run win, preserved by Harris’s acrobatic catch and third baseman Austin Riley’s swift throw across to nip Harper by a step and a half to finish the unlikely double play, Castellanos didn’t sound too worried. “We thrive after we get punched in the face,” he said.

Thrive? How about feeding frenzy. Right after Harper unloaded, Alec Bohm shot a base hit into left, Bryson Stott walked, and J.T. Realmuto pumped a two-run double to the back of left field. And every Braves fan in the nation probably asked why manager Brian Snitker—who started Elder with no better options available for this game—didn’t have anyone up in the pen yet.

“I thought maybe he would go five,” Snitker said of Elder, whose first two innings were deceptively masterful with six-up, six-down including four strikeouts, and who had a one-run lead after Ozzie Albies singled Ronald Acuña, Jr. (one-out double) home in the top of the third. “The way Bryce was throwing, I was thinking, ‘Man, he was really good.’ The slider was good. The changeup was good. It was the third inning of the game, with a lot to cover on the back end of it.”

It turned out the Braves had to find ways to cover a five-run Phillies lead after the bottom of the third’s demolition finally ended. But two innings later, leading off against veteran Brad Hand, the third Braves reliever of the day, Harper launched one parabolically over the center field fence. And gave Arcia a second stare down rounding second while he was at it.

Arcia extracted his own ounce of flesh when he singled Marcel Ozuna (one-out single) home against Phillies reliever Matt Strahm with two out in the top of the sixth. That’d teach him further. With two out in the bottom of that inning, Trea Turner shot one over the left center field fence off AJ Smith-Shawver, the fourth Braves pitcher on the night. Smith-Shawver endured long enough for Castellanos and Marsh to greet him rudely opening the bottom of the eighth with back-to-back solo bombs into the real estate Turner had reached.

Nothing—not even Phillies starter Aaron Nola’s nine-strikeout, five-and-two-thirds innings work, which somehow got pushed well into the background thanks to their offensive mayhem—quite equaled the magnitude of Harper’s first blast in the third, but when he hit the second in the fifth, he pushed himself into extremely elite territory—and pushed Hall of Famer in waiting Albert Pujols out of it.

Pujols was fifth in postseason OPS among men with at least 150 postseason plate appearances with .995; Harper shot his way past Pujols with what’s now 1.011. Ahead of him, in ascending order: Carlos Beltrán (1.021) and Hall of Famers George Brett (1.023), Babe Ruth (1.214), and Lou Gehrig (1.214). Harper also has a 1.132 OPS in this postseason alone thus far.

According to the reboutable MLB analyst Sarah Langs, Harper has also homered in eight postseason games since becoming a Phillie—and the team’s 8-0 in those games. Tying Harper with a longtime Brave, Javy Lopez, for the longest such postseason streak ever for a player starting his career with a particular team . . . but the longest for any player with a new team.

And what about this year’s Atlanta threshing machine, the team who smashed a record 307 home runs on the regular season and led the National League in runs, hits, team batting average, team on-base percentage, team slugging, and team OPS? Entering Game Three, the Braves were out-scored 7-5 while posting a team 150/.215/.250 slash line and a .465 OPS.

Now, the Braves are out-scored 15-9 for the set. They’ll need more than Strider being Strider on the mound this time, though the Phillies found ways to beat him in two prior postseason chances. (Last year, they sliced him for four runs in two and a third, charging a fifth to him when Harper—who else?—hit one over the right center field fence off Strider’s relief Dylan Lee with J.T. Realmuto aboard before Strider left the game.)

The Braves need their bats to find ways around scheduled Phillies Game Four starter Ranger Suárez and a better-positioned Phillies bullpen. They need Acuña to hit truly like the 40/70 player he was on the season. They need Snitker to do better in the bullpen management department.

Mostly, they need to find ways to keep Harper from Harpering. They also need to remind themselves that not even Harper takes them for granted.

“We know they’re really good, and they’re not going to fall down or die or anything like that,” Harper said after Game Three. “They’re a really, really good organization, a really good team, and we’ve seen that all year from them. But we have a crowd that’s 45 (thousand) strong, and we’re very excited to go into tomorrow and play a great game.”

If the Phillies are that excited, the Braves might be in more trouble than even Game Three made them look.

NLDS Game Two: Awakening the sleeping Braves

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Travis d'Arnaud, Zack Wheeler

Travis d’Arnaud was only too happy to remind people what can happen when a lineup gets a third crack at his old Mets teammate Zack Wheeler . . .

If you expect to keep the Atlanta threshing machine from threshing, you can’t let any of them see Zack Wheeler the third time around. Not even if he’s taking a one-hitter into the seventh. Not even if you’re about to have your next two National League division series games in your own yard. Not even if the lone run out of him to that point scored on a tough fielding mistake.

You just might end up awakening the sleeping Braves.

Which is just what happened Monday night in Atlanta, the Braves overthrowing a 4-1 Phillies lead to win, 5-4. Slamming an exclamation point home with one of the most daring game-ending double plays anyone could hope to see, at any time.

Wheeler lost his no-hit bid and the Phillies’ bid for a second straight shutout in the bottom of the sixth, on Braves shortstop Ozzie Albies’s two-out single, sending Ronald Acuña, Jr. (two-out walk) home after Phillies shortstop Trea Turner misplayed a one-hop throw in from right. Phillies manager Rob Thomson elected to send Wheeler back out for the seventh.

Brain fart. Wheeler lifetime came into Game Two with opposition OPSes that accelerated each time through an opposing lineup: .594 the first time, with 39 home runs; .638 the second time, with 37 home runs; but, .759 with 47 home runs the third time. He was already in his third round with the Braves lineup when he walked Acuña in the sixth.

So with the Phillies leading by three, Wheeler opened with Matt Olson singling up the pipe, Marcel Ozuna striking out swinging, but Travis d’Arnaud—Wheeler’s former Mets teammate in the bargain—hitting the first pitch into the left field seats. As Truist Park went nuts over the first extra-base hit by the Braves all set long, then Thomson lifted Wheeler for Jose Alvarado.

“I wanted him to go back out, and he said he was fine,” Thomson said of Wheeler postgame. “He still looked good, so I was all in.” Three batters in, Wheeler was all out and the Braves were back on the march.

They continued marching with one out in the bottom of the eighth. Alvarado yielded to Jeff Hoffman, who hit Acuña on the left arm with his first pitch before Albies pushed him to second with a ground out. But then Acuña stole third with Austin Riley at the plate, and Riley rewarded Acuña’s larceny with his own drive into those left field seats.

The Phillies hung four on the board in the first five innings against a clearly struggling Braves starter Max Fried and Braves reliever Kirby Yates. Alec Bohm singled Turner (one-out double to the back of center field) home in the first. With Bryce Harper (one-out single) in the third, J.T. Realmuto hit one the other way into the right center-field bullpen.

With one out in the fifth, and Yates on the mound, Nick Castellanos (single) stole second and took third when d’Arnaud’s throw went far enough offline while Bryson Stott waited at the plate. Then Stott lofted a fly to center sending Castellanos home on the sacrifice fly.

d’Arnaud at least got his shot at redemption two innings later. The Phillies might have had a fatter lead for the Braves to overcome but for stranding the bases loaded in the first, stranding Johan Rojas on second (after a one-out walk and an advance on a wild pitch) in the second, and stranding first and second in the fourth and the sixth.

The defending National League champions had one more grand opportunity in the ninth when Harper pried a leadoff walk out of Braves relief ace A.J. Minter, prompting Braves manager Brian Snitker to reach for closer Raisel Iglesias. After Realmuto flied out to center, Castellanos sent one to the rear end of right center. Center fielder Michael Harris II ran it down like a cop chasing a mugger.

“I knew off the bat it was going to be close to the fence,” he said postgame. “I knew once I went back I wasn’t stopping. I was going to do anything I could to get a glove on it. If my body had to go down because of that, I would have done that.” His body didn’t go down despite its rude meeting with the fence, but he caught the drive and winged a throw in that snuck past Albies and meant disaster. For about three seconds.

Riley backed the play alertly, with Harper having rounded second hell bent on getting as close to the plate with the tying run as he could. But Riley fired a strike across the infield to first, making Harper pay for being just a little over-aggressive.

“Usually, you don’t pass the base,” said Thomson postgame. “You stay in front of it, make sure it’s not caught. But he thought the ball was clearly over his head, didn’t think he was going to catch it. And Harris made a heck of a play. Unbelievable.” Heck of a play? The Elias Sports Bureau says it’s the first time a postseason game ever ended on a double play involving any outfielder.

You hate to say a series tied at one game each has become treacherous. But Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park is a haven for hitting, and re-awakening the Braves’ threshing machine, after they spent the series’ first fourteen innings scoreless, is not a sound idea. Especially when they hit a record 307 homers on the regular season—including 24 against the Phillies exactly half of which were put in the Bank.

Thomson said the split in Atlanta was disappointing but, what the hey, now the Phillies have the home field advantage. The Braves didn’t put their best 2023 road show on in the Bank. (That honour belonged to Cincinnati’s hitting haven of Great American Ballpark.) But they’re not exactly pushovers in Philadelphia, either.

NLDS Games One: The Atlanta Chop Slop, the Los Angeles funeral parlour

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Truist Park

Trash talk? Have at it. Trash the field over a call going against you? What was this, Braves fan?

Neither the Dodgers nor the Phillies expected simple National League division series this time around. Not with both teams coming in with what some call patchwork pitching. But one came out looking better in their Game One while the other came out looking like the remnant of a nuclear attack.

The Phillies and their pitching managed to keep the Atlanta threshing machine from threshing Saturday afternoon, winning 3-0. Starting with a first-inning nuking of future Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw, the Diamondbacks laid waste to the Dodgers Saturday night, 11-2. On the arms of big enough bats and a starting pitcher who was usually close enough to Dodger batting practise.

Letting starter Ranger Suárez go no more than three and two thirds, knowing they’d have a day off between Games One and Two, the Phillies went to a bullpen game, essentially. And that bullpen finished what Suárez started, shutting the Braves out over the remaining five and a third. The Braves who hit a record 307 home runs on the regular season looked as though they had paper towel tubes for bats.

None more glaring than the founding father of the 40/70 club. Ronald Acuña, Jr. went 0-for-3 with a walk, and his evening’s futility included an embarrassing called strikeout in the fifth, when—with first and third and one out—the second Phillies reliever of the evening, Seranthony Domínguez, planted a fastball right on the low inside corner.

Small wonder that Braves manager Brian Snitker could and did say, postgame, “I think it was more their pitching than our hitting.” Indeed.

Braves starter Spencer Strider pitched boldly enough, striking eight out and scattering five hits in seven innings’ work. But the Phillies still pried two runs out of him, both with Bryce Harper the big factor. First, Strider threw wild enough trying to pick Harper off first in the top of the fourth, enabling Bryson Stott to single him home with the first run. Then, Strider threw Harper enough of a meatball to disappear into the Chop House seats behind right field with one out in the top of the sixth.

“Strider, man, he’s one of the best in the game. You know he’s going to come at you and throw his best at you,” Harper said postgame. “So just trying to get a pitch over and was able to get the slider up and do some damage.”

Except for Acuña’s surprising silence, and the eighth-inning catcher’s interference call with J.T. Realmuto at the plate and the Phillies with the bases loaded, enabling the third Phillie run home, the Braves at least looked stronger in Game One defeat than the Dodgers did. Even Strider, who became the first postseason pitcher ever to lose twice against a team against whom he’s well undefeated in the regular season.

The Diamondbacks didn’t let Clayton Kershaw—all 35 years old of him, with possible lingering shoulder issues plus eight days of rest leaving him with little enough to offer—get out of the first alive. Their 35-year-old journeyman starter Merrill Kelly, who didn’t turn up in the Show until age 30 in the first place, manhandled them for six and a third after the Snakes bit Kershaw deep in the first.

For the regular season’s final two months, with a 2.23 ERA over eight starts, Kershaw seemed to tell age and his shoulder alike where to stuff it. Then Kershaw took the ball Saturday night. What’s the saying about too much rest being as hazardous to a pitcher as too little rest can be?

Ketel Marte opened with a double to the back of left center field, and Corbin Carroll began showing why he’s in the Rookie of the Year conversation with a prompte RBI single. Tommy Pham—the same Tommy Pham who called out the lack of work ethic among second-tier Mets teammates with whom he played before the trade deadline—rapped a short single to left for first and second.

Then Christian Walker, a veteran first baseman who hadn’t been anything much special before 2022, hit one so far to the back of the left field bleachers some wondered how the ball didn’t leave the ballpark structure. Just like that, Dodger Stadium resembled a funeral parlour. And, just like that, Kershaw resembled the corpse for whom the audience came to mourn.

A ground out by Lourdes Gurriel, Jr. and a walk to Alek Thomas later, Evan Longoria sent Thomas all the way home with a double to deep center field, hammering the final nails into Kershaw’s coffin.

“Embarrassing,” the lefthander said postgame. “You just feel like you let everybody down. The guys, a whole organization, that looked to you to pitch well in Game One. It’s just embarrassing, really. So I just feel like I let everybody down. It’s a tough way to start the postseason. Obviously, we still have a chance at this thing, but that wasn’t the way it should’ve started for me.”

Kershaw’s postseason history is a direct contrast to the regular-season career that guarantees him a place in Cooperstown. Until Saturday night, enough of that sad history came by way of leaving him in too long or by circumstances above and beyond his control.

Entering Game One with a 5.49 ERA against the Dodgers lifetime but a 7.03 ERA against them when pitching in Dodger Stadium, Kelly pitched six and a third shutout innings before turning it over to a bullpen that kept the Dodgers to one hit. The bad news: the hit was a two-run triple by Will Smith off Miguel Castro. The good news: The Snakes could afford such generosity by then, since it cut an 11-0 lead by a measly two runs.

Kelly’s keys included forgetting how the Dodgers treated him like a piñata in regular season play. “I’m watching our guys beat up on one of the best pitchers that we’ve ever seen in our lives and watching them do it in the first game I’ve ever pitched in the playoffs,” he said postgame. “I felt if I gave those games any attention I was going out there behind the eight-ball before I even stepped on the mound.”

This time, Kelly went out there with a six-run cushion, then saw it padded to nine by a three-run second including Carroll leading off against Dodger reliever Emmet Sheehan with a drive into the right field bleachers. Kelly was now comfortable enough that he could have pitched from a high-backed leather office chair and incurred no damage.

The only thing that should have and apparently did embarrass the Braves was the Truist Park crowd throwing drinks onto the field after catcher Sean Murphy’s mitt grazed Realmuto’s bat by a thin hair. You could hear it on replays that didn’t exactly show it too clearly, but Murphy’s lack of challenging the call affirmed it.

Trea Turner—who started a spectacular double play with Acuña (leadoff walk) on third to end the bottom of the eighth, diving left for Ozzie Albies’s ground smash and backhanding to second baseman Stott—scored on the interference. The rain of drinks into the outfield annoyed both the Braves and their manager.

“There’s no excuse for that,” Snitker snapped postgame. “It’s scary because those water bottles, when they come, they’re like grenades. It could really seriously injure one of our players.”

That’s what the miscreants don’t stop to think about. Against a team whose fan base is usually considered one of the worst in the game. (Remember the Philadelphia wedding: the clergyman pronounces the happy couple husband and wife before telling the gathering, “You may now boo the bride.”) Be better, Braves fans.

Only the silence in Dodger Stadium following the Diamondbacks’ early and often abuse of Kershaw and Sheehan kept the big National League division series headlines elsewhere from reading, “Chop Slop.”